It’s a common problem: Your characters simply won’t do what you want them to do. You’ve got plans, they’ve got other plans. Are you supposed to just let them run wild or can you somehow make them actually follow the plot you laid out for them?
There’s one trick that can really change things for you and make your characters do exactly what you need them to, and as a fantastic bonus, your story becomes much more interesting. Here’s the big secret: You can force your characters do what you want them to do by taking away all other options. Let’s talk about how to do that.
Related content: Watch the video version of this post – How to plot a novel – How to create conflict in a novel – When you have characters and no plot
Why your characters can’t just do what they want
If you’re new to writing stories, you might not yet know how important problems and obstacles are. Stories where characters can just chill and do whatever they want aren’t interesting and they’re probably not going anywhere either.
Stories are interesting when you have to push your characters. It’s not just about having to survive a natural disaster or get out of Hunger Games alive, it’s also about having to be nice to people they don’t like, go to places that are too far from home and learn skills that feel impossible.
Which is more interesting? Is it knowing exactly how a story is going to play out, or wondering how an earth a character will do what they need to do? Certainly, it’s the latter, and that’s why your characters can’t just be following their bliss all the time.
Character goals should be hard to do and hard to WANT TO do
It might sound surprising, but your character’s main goal in the story shouldn’t just be difficult to do, it should be difficult to want to do. It makes your story so much more interesting.
For example, getting out of Hunger Games alive isn’t just hard to do, because in order to survive, you need to kill everyone else, and that means deciding your life matters more than theirs, which can be hard to want to do. If Katniss was already an assassin or something, the story would be far less interesting.
Above all else, you want to avoid having your readers say “so what?” Why should they care about this particular story anyway? Difficulties breed intrigue, while predictability doesn’t.
Why would anyone choose to do something they don’t really want to do?
There are two things I really dislike, and they are emptying the dishwasher and hanging laundry up to dry. And yet do them I must, because the alternative is that I’ll have an untidy home and musty clothes, and I don’t want either of those things. As in, there is an end result that matters to me more than avoiding those two things.
A story is, of course, much more interesting than my housework, but it’s the same principle. There’s something on the other side of doing that unpleasant thing that matters more than the discomfort of doing something yucky.
Here are some motivations for doing things people don’t really want to do:
- survival and safety
- someone else’s survival and safety
- getting or keeping someone’s love
- getting or keeping someone’s respect
- keeping current quality of life or getting a better one
- money
- sense of responsibility
- religion, morals or other beliefs
If you don’t know why your character would do something, you need to change that character or their circumstances. That’s it.
Survival alone isn’t interesting
Although I mentioned survival above, it isn’t an interesting enough motivation alone. That’s why so many disaster films fall short – there’s nothing interesting because generally speaking we all want to live. We’re just watching the movie for the special effects.
Why else would the character want to survive but for the sake of survival? Did they just fall in love? Do they have a family to protect? It needs to be something that makes is truly root for the character’s survival.
How to take away your character’s options
So now that you know why it’s important to make your characters do things they don’t want to do, we can get into the HOW.
Humans will always pick the option that feels like the easiest and the most comfortable one, even if it doesn’t make to anyone else. A dog will keep sitting on the nail just because getting up hurts more than sitting in place. If you want your characters to stop choosing the easy options, you need to take those options away.
Let’s say you want to have your character go through a forest. Who cares, right? Well, let’s make it more difficult and add face-eating witches – now it’s more difficult and more interesting, and now we just have to make it difficult to want to do. Maybe your character is famous for her beauty and therefore has more to lose when getting her face eaten, or maybe her mother got killed by having her visage chomped off by a witch.
Now it seems pretty reasonable that your character would choose one of these options:
- stay home
- do something completely different
- go around the forest instead of going through it
Now you just have to take those options away:
- make it imperative that your character goes through the forest by having something on the other side that they can’t get by staying home
- make that goal impossible to get by going around the forest, perhaps by imposing some kind of a time limit or other restrictions
- make it impossible to ask someone else to go through the forest, perhaps by making it too expensive for your character to pay someone to do it
For example, maybe your character’s sister is gravely ill and she needs a medicine from the other side of the forest, and going around the forest would take too much time. Being loyal to your sister is one thing, but you should also add some other reasons for your character to want to do this, like perhaps their mother asked her to always look after her sister.
Or alternatively, maybe your character has committed a crime and she needs to run away from the sheriff by going through the forest where nobody else wants to go. Going around the forest is not an option because she could get caught, and staying put is not an option either because she’d rather risk dying faceless in the forest than lose her freedom.
They don’t have to act “out of character”
We already lightly brushed against this subject, but having a character do something they don’t want to do doesn’t immediately mean they’re acting out of character. As we already discussed, many things can motivate your characters do all kinds of difficult things. It would only be out of character if you first showed your character being really loyal to their family and then halfway through you’d have them chase money above all else.
It’s also important to remember that people are not just one thing, forever. Someone who works hard at their business can be lazy about housekeeping, and perhaps they’ll even eventually realise there’s more to life than making profit.
This makes your story more believable
Have you ever read a story and wondered why the characters would even bother doing what they do? Why don’t they just go home? That’s a big problem, and the writer could have avoided it by reading this post first.
You or your readers don’t have to agree with everything your characters do, but considering what the character and their circumstances are like, it should make sense. (There will always be people who can’t fathom people making choices that they wouldn’t make, but there’s no need to write for those people specifically.)
Difficult choices make your story more interesting
If your story is just smooth sailing and there’s no uncertainty of how things will turn out or what your characters will do, your story is, frankly said, boring. Easy and obvious doesn’t make up for an interesting and unforgettable story.
So when you do all this work, it doesn’t only help you make your characters do exactly what you want them to, it helps you write a better story. That’s what we all want, right? So go and write your amazing story where you put your characters through hell and back, and maybe get my free plotter before you do that.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
